Sunday, December 31, 2017

Blitzer on MS-13, Lind on “Chain Migration”

Two excellent articles from the mainstream to close out the year.—TPOI editor

The Teens Trapped Between a Gang and the Law
On Long Island, unaccompanied minors are caught between the violence of MS-13 and the fear of deportation.

By Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker
January 1, 2018
Juliana grew up with a single memory of her father. He was sitting in the half-light of evening on the porch of their home, in a small town in El Salvador, while her mother cooked dinner in the kitchen. A man in a black mask emerged from the darkness. Juliana heard three gunshots, and saw her father fall off his chair, vomiting blood. She was three years old at the time, and afterward she wondered if the killing had actually happened. The most tangible detail was the man in the mask, who came to seem more present in her life than her father ever was. Juliana used to find her mother by the windows, pulling back a corner of the curtains to be sure that he had not returned. “It was like that man went on living with us,” Juliana told me. One day when she was older, her mother said that a gang called the Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, had killed her father for refusing to pay a tax on a deli that he operated out of the house.[…]

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What “chain migration” really means — and why Donald Trump hates it so much
Family-based immigration” doesn’t sound as scary — or get at the fear of losing control.

By Dara Lind, Vox
December 29, 2017
Over the course of President Donald Trump’s first year in office, his administration’s top immigration priority has shifted subtly. He’s talking less about deporting “bad hombres” and talking more — a lot more — about how “chain migration” is bad for the United States.

“We have to get rid of chainlike immigration, we have to get rid of the chain,” Trump told the New York Times’s Mike Schmidt in an impromptu interview at his West Palm Beach golf club in December.[…]

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